Snack of Shavian wit served with Russian dressing
The Russian Play
★★★ 1/2
Written by Hannah Moscovitch. Directed by Diana Donnelly.
Until Oct. 12, Royal George Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake. ShawFest.com or 1-800-511-7429
The annual lunchtime short piece of the programming at the Shaw Festival is typically a sweet little theatrical snack readymade for little kids with short attention spans or an older theatre lover looking for a light and breezy way to make the most of their trip to Niagara.
The title of Hannah Moscovitch’s The Russian Play does not suggest it will fit this bill.
On paper, too, it suggests a more bitter bite than the lunchtime slot at11:30 am is used to — Sonya (Gabriella Sundar Singh) is our narrator, and over 45 minutes, she tells the audience how her satisfied life as a flower shop girl ended in a Siberian gulag all because of love: how she fell into it, with a gravedigger named Piotr (Peter Fernandes), and how she attracted it, from a wealthy merchant with political ties, Kostya (Mike Nadajewski). In most respects, Moscovitch’s short play lives up to its title, full of yearning and angst and vodka and namedropping Chekhov and Tolstoy in the first few seconds (which is especially impactful for a Shaw Festival audience, no strangers to Chekhov but maybe unfamiliar with Moscovitch, despite her being one of the country’s most prolific contemporary playwrights).
But what makes The Russian Play not a Russian play is its tongue-in-cheek self-awareness — Moscovitch isn’t Russian, and she has called her early plays “anti-autobiography.” The emotional distance between herself and Sonya lets Moscovitch’s dry sense of humour come through in this “shit Russian love story” whenever Sonya directly addresses the audience, resenting how much the trajectory of her life fits into our stereotype of a Russian story, but thinking there’s something to be learned in it anyway. Both Singh and director Diana Donnelly nail this element of The Russian Play, a tone that consistently shifts between earnestness and cynicism, often in a split-second turn toward the audience or shift in Singh’s big, expressive eyes (or in Gillian Gallow’s design, piling bright flowers against a deep, dark backdrop with an uneven surface that blurs Michelle Ramsay’s lighting into a faded, worn effect).
Both Fernandes and Nadajewski are impressive here, but Singh’s performance is the driving force behind this sombre but quickly paced story and it’s an interesting one, confrontational and sympathetic at the same time. The few moments of Sonya’s softness we get to see — melting in front of Piotr, singing a Russian love song — are moments of honesty that punch through the show’s more putupon aesthetics, like the performers’ heavy accents and exaggerated costume pieces (in Piotr’s case, he’s so covered in dirt we practically lose half of Fernandes’s face).
Donnelly adds a violinist to her production, performed by Marie Mahabal, to provide a soundtrack (and sometimes active participant) for Sonya’s interior mood.
Although this is sometimes effective, it sometimes unnecessarily complicates Donnelly’s staging. For instance, there is a pivotal moment of vulnerability (or is it manipulation?) between Piotr and Sonya that brings about the undoing of their relationship. It’s unclear where Mahabal fits into this duet.
Premiering at the SummerWorks Festival in 2006, The Russian Play is rarely done now, and if it is, it’s often paired within a double bill (running between 30 and 45 minutes depending on the production). Still, it shows the beginnings of some key Moscovitchian elements: a narrator divulging their secrets to the audience, a sarcastic sense of humour, women who are tapped into their desires and personal lives and struggling to negotiate those with a world that does not allow them.
Even if it’s an appetizer, this lunchtime play is worth seeing for those who want to get to know the world of a Canadian Shavian contemporary.